It's got the feels and the sounds. Plus, a killer title!
Really, that's all I need to say. Excellent song, lovely to listen to.
Thanks!
But this song got me thinking, you said "have at it"... So in no particular order:
Love the sparse opening and build. But it feels like there's one too many guitars there. And I should know, because I've written and arranged zero successful songs.
You might be right. There are 2 fingerpick acoustics. In phones, they weave between each other, but through speakers they can seem crowded.
This lyric surprised me:
you'd turn up the music. i'd close my book
I figured it would be the opposite, like
i'd hide in a book.
If the music is too loud, you can't really concentrate on reading...
Because I'm way too literal, this line was a bit confusing:
i thought they were losers just after your money
Are her friends a bunch of gold-diggers trying to marry her? Yeah, this is why I'm never invited to parties. (Because I'm literal, not because I'm a gold-digger).
That was one of the original lines. I'm not wild about it myself, but left it as is. If I were writing this myself, it is not something I would have put in...
I was just pointing out to my daughter the other day why I'm no good at writing pop music: I have a compulsion to write more words, instead of using repetition. Repetition is good, and these lines remind me of exactly that:
thought my head would stop hurtin' out of the blue
thought my head would stop hurtin' once you said we were through
Heck, that's nothing...Just wait for my next one. It has a a whole bunch more repetition....
Lyrically, this chorus looks like like a bridge, but melodically it's a chorus.
(This is the point where I double-check to see if the title of the song is "You Said We Were Through").
That was, in fact, the original title. I changed it to differentiate this version from the original - which had an entirely different melody (which I felt was wrong for the lyric - so I scraped it and wrote a whole new melody...
There are some interesting word choices when you call back to the first verse -
"chuckles" and
"spare":
saving up laughter with chuckles to spare
in a house filled with lonely because you're not hereI wouldn't have gone with "chuckles", but then...
zero hit songs to my name!
I did NOT care for the "chuckles" myself, but it was in the original and Lisa was quite fond of it, so I did not touch that part (I wrote the "lonely" line.)
I didn't initially notice the first chorus was "head" and the second "heart". Subtle and clever.
The head/heart thing is Lisa's doing. She is a clever lyricist.
There is one bit that confuses me, though. I noticed the first verse sets up the singer as the one who's complaining, who seemingly can't wait to be alone. But it's revealed at the end of the first verse that he's not the one that said goodbye first:
thought my head would stop hurtin' once you said we were through
But... it really feels like the song is structured to hide that particular bit of information until the very last line of the song, as a final twist payoff.
That is, if that hadn't been at the end of the first verse, I'd be totally convinced that he told her goodbye first.
And then I'd get to the end and be all "Oh, Henry snap, I didn't see that coming!"
I agree with you on this. But, again, was the way the song was originally structured and changing that would have been difficult. That being said, it is more an expectation (on our part) than a "mistake"...
Or maybe I'm just overthinking things.
Nah.
Anyway, I had fun listening, and fun spending way too much time analyzing it.
I always enjoy your musings on our musings.
Also, after looking at your formatting, I finally figured how to get those indents working. I didn't think non-breaking spaces could be used, but now I know better!
Thanks for the in-depth review!!
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